The beef from Nicaragua is truly sublime; grass fed and naturally lower in fat, it represents one of the great cuts of meat in the world.  Easily on par with Japan and Argentina, the simple methods used by the Nicaraguan ranchers are attracting the attention of international connoisseurs, chefs, and the meat eating public. Because the cattle eat natural grasses while roaming freely, are grown without the use of hormones, and because they are not feed-lotted to bulk up before slaughter, the meat retains a stronger and more natural flavor without the fatty marbling commonly found in premium beef. In essence, it is a throwback to a more simple time before the grind of industry and science found its way onto our dinner table.

Patricia Tomlinson, the chef and owner of Dragonfly Restaurant in Tamarindo Costa Rica, knows her beef. This filet cut, coupled with the classic Argentinian chimichurri makes for a summertime classic here in the land of the endless summer. Chimichurri is a rather simple sauce of olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, and fresh herbs is a staple of the Argentinian table and one of the most famous cultural exports from the country that brought us tango. The slight, biting, lemony edge, coupled with the richness of a fine olive oil and basil harmonizes beautifully with the slightly pungent Nicaraguan beef creating an instant classic of Latin American culinaire. A simple and fresh accompaniment of herb roasted potatoes and sauteed red pepper, carrot, and zucchini finish the dish.

For the food photography I wanted to create an image that matched the richness and colors of the dish. I generally strive for a Zen-like simplicity and avoid external props, but for this image I wanted a different feel than normal, an earthy, busy photograph where every element graphically draws the eye to the center of the frame.  This image took about 90 minutes of setup on location at Dragonfly, with endless tweaking of lights and reflectors, props, plate, and food; but the finished image is a successful. Tish was very patient and accomidating as I dominated a large portion of her restaurant with lights, tripods, and cables.

Here is the lighting diagram for the shoot. A high shutter speed canceled any ambient light left over from outside.

Some things are best left unmolested- paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, a perfect ripe fig, Ennio Morricone scores, and mojitos. These days everything is remixed, mashed with something else, fused culturally , dumbed down and f-ed up to accommodate our ever diminishing attention spans and need to consume newness for the sake of new. Movies are remade, and lounge versions of ’90 death metal circulate at restaurants like elevator music for hip adults . Just try to find a Mojito recipe that isn’t spoiled with white chocolate, peach, cloudberries, or basil to accommodate the creators sense of  creative self worth. It is simple, sometimes things that are good and perfect must be left alone. I don’t want an E-Type Jaguar with those huge and stupid chrome rims, and I don’t want Valrhona chocolate in my summer drink .

THE BEST MOJITO HAS SIX INGREDIENTS.

Here they are:

Cuban Rum, preferably Havana Club dark.

Fresh, washed mint.

White Sugar.

Soda Water. Not San Pellegrino or Perrier, but Soda Water.

Ice, in cubes.

Limes   (thanks Jules)

Add a Tablespoon of sugar to the glass with many sprigs of fresh mint. Use more mint than you think that you need. Smash the hell out of the mint and the sugar with a mortar, or as I like to use a stalk of sugar cane until it is seriously bruised.

Add rum and mix with mint. Use a lot of rum, why screw around with the active ingredient?

Add the ice in cubes. (crushed ice dilutes everything too quickly and is for tourists and dilettantes)

Add soda water to fill, and mix well by pouring in another cup and back again.

It is best to drink Mojitos in Havana while chain-smoking Russian cigarettes, but anywhere hot and humid will do. Do not drink Mojitos in Michigan during the winter, that is like drinking Sake at Thanksgiving – It is pointless, lacks context, and shows the world that you are a Philistine and a poor host.

For the photograph I used a backlit shooting table and a silver reflector to the left, Broncolor strobes, a D3 Nikon and a 100mm Zeiss Makro Planar ZF.2 lens. The photo has real ice cubes, not fake acrylic, and the mojitos were enjoyed after the photoshoot.

The above video shows a shutter cycle at 1/4000th of a second. As you can see, the shutter never fully opens, just a slit of the front and rear curtains scans the sensor during exposure. Now if you can imagine a flash burst that was faster than this shutter cycle, you can see why you would only see a thin slit in your image. What we are doing with the Broncolor is using a flash duration that is longer than the shutter cycle so that the flash is on during the whole 1/8000 of a second sweep of the shutter.

Color balance is of key concern when taking only a portion of a flash curve. The first part of the curve is quite blue in color temperature, with the temperature gradually getting warmer as the flash burst fades. I used a gray card and took a custom white balance with the settings as follows.

Nikon D3 ISO 1000 F22 @ 1/8000 second.

Sb-800 speedlight on manual 1/16 connected to camera with a duct-taped peanut slave on the front. Pocketwizard sender connected to peanut slave.

Broncolor Mobil at full power 1200 joules, pocketwizard receiver.

Pulso head with gridded beauty dish and bounce reflector.

The above water drops from the top of the page are shot at exactly these settings.

The holy grail of beverage photography is the ability to sync a flash at a high enough speed to stop the liquid, and beverage photographers have been using exotic and expensive lighting to achieve these results. Beverage photographers have traditionally used very high power strobes, dialed to the minimum power settings to create the shortest flash durations. With the advent of the fast flash duration, Profoto and the Broncolor studio packs boast the ability to achive durations as fast as 1/8000 (Broncolor Scoro) of a second, but let’s face it, a Scoro pack is ten grand! Using affordable power packs like a Mobil (any older design budget flash unit with a slow duration should work) the ability to freeze liquid in mid air can be applied by the average photographer with more modest equipment.

The real difficulty in shooting a “pour” is not the flash sync. I found that once the technical part of my flash duration was under control the real problem was getting the liquid to behave in a way that is visually pleasing. Liquids tend to froth and foam, and to counteract that I added a bit of salt to the water above.

For this test of a wine pour, I used a frosted shooting table and a bowl pressed against the back side of the plex to create a pleasing gradient. The procedure of testing this pour trashed my kitchen- wine EVERYWHERE, paper towels on the floor, wine spatter on my lens and camera, clothing- a disaster. The result is still beyond sloppy, and nowhere near what I want, but this is testing right? The key, as in all food photography, is styling. Everything must be perfectly clean and spotless. This is time consuming when you shoot a pour,  the glass and shooting table must be cleaned, the set must be be refreshed, camera refocused, and another pour is attempted. This process repeats many, many times and you wind up with a kitchen soaked with lightly salted red wine. I believe the key is to mount a hose in a place to give a consistent angle of pour and create a system that can be tweeked a little at a time to create the desired result more accurately.

I am in no way finished with my high speed sync testing with beverage pours, there is a long way to go. The beauty of the technique is the ability to see the world in frozen time. Liquids look like they are carved from glass at 1/8000 of a second, it is surreal. I will update this post with finished images of the next test as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will do my best to answer them.

-Sean Davis

Surf & Turf

Sometimes things just work perfectly, the planets align and good fortune smiles upon you. As a food photographer, I am at the mercy of the chef – bad chef = crap photos, no matter what kind of tricky lighting and Photoshop skills you have. A great chef gives you the plate shown here.  Chef Michael Brough from the Four Seasons in Costa Rica created this study in simplicity and perfection, riffing on the classic surf and turf and bringing to the party the finest piece of beef that can be prepared. The meat is cooked sous-vide style, a technique developed by Thomas Keller from the French Laundry. Sous vide cooking involves seasoning and searing the beef, vacuum packing it, and cooking it at a controlled temperature for several hours. The result of all of this is sublime, and superior to conventional cooking methods. In the wake of this recent “molecular cooking” trend, the real winner is sous vide, it is just that superior. I believe that the foams and the sodium alginate pearls will fade away with the standing rib roast of yesterday, but my grandchildren will cook with their meat in vacuum bags.

For the photograph I used natural lighting from the 12:00 position, a gridded strobe in a beauty dish above, a large softbox at 9:00, and a mirror kicking a focused beam of natural light on the face of the beef. Processed from RAW in CS5 and NIK.

Camera: D3 with a Carl Zeiss 100mm ZF.2 Macro Planar.

Lights: Broncolor

Saint Vivant Armagnac VSOP

I wanted to create the “classic” luxury brandy shot with the golden spot background  and the glow in the bottle. I also need to test a new lens, camera, and lighting, so with some reflectors pilfered from Peter Lippmann and a sheet of glass for shooting I set up the studio and got to work. The lens is special, a Carl Zeiss 100mm f2 manual focus Macro Planar ZF.2, that was somehow converted from its primary role as a Arri motion picture lens to work with a Nikon DSLR. I bought it to shoot products and headshots, and after a couple of days of testing I must say that it is the finest lens that I have ever owned, sharper than my camera sensor and with the best bokeh that I have ever seen for portraits. Everything shot with it just snaps and looks three dimensional, with perfect colors. Amazing.

The camera tested is a Nikon D3, and for this shot I set it to full blast RAW 14 bit. The dynamic range of this camera is awesome, and that can be seen clearly in this product shot filled with sweeping gradients and subtle tones.

Lighting was accomplished with a  Broncolor pack, a Pulso focusing head with a deep gold gel firing at a black card (for the glow), and another head in a socked beauty dish that was modified with black paper to give a linear spectral highlight on the left side of the bottle. The hard part was arranging the reflectors to light the label and make the liquid glow. Photoshop work mostly involved removing pollen from the bottle and glass surface and some mild dickery correcting imperfections in the glass and glow.

The Armagnac with the phallic bottle is, ironically, from Condom France.

Simplicity is best

I adore bouillabaisse. I learned to make a great one years ago from a French chef, have had the real thing in Marseille fresh from the Mediterranean, and now have had the best one ever in the unlikely location of Costa Rica. Ben Zeigler is a chef here in Tamarindo, and in his former restaurant he prepared this dish, a masterpiece of freshness and technique prepared with local seafood. I really enjoy everything culinaire, and photographing food is an absolute favorite of mine. This shot has a fair amount of trick lighting and food styling. I light food from unlikely angles to accentuate the shape and the color but tend to be  minimalist in my approach to food photography. For me, simplicity is best. Show off the food, and leave the staging of wine bottles, placesettings, and pointless flower displays out of the picture. I used a huge sheet of black formica as a shooting surface, and smeared it with olive oil for some spectral highlights beneath the bowl that add depth and action. Besides that, the food speaks for itself, and that is truly the point. This was photographed on location at the restaurant where I built a makeshift studio and photographed it during dinner service, a daunting task that required a load of lighting power to overcome any ambient light in the restaurant. The finished photographed appeared on the cover of a local food guide where the printer botched to color and destroyed a really great photograph.

The reflection on the soy adds interest.

Food photography, the dark art, made more impossible by shooting sushi on location at the restaurant. Food photography is probably the most difficult specialty in photography; sauces run, meat looks dry in seconds, lettuce wilts, and sushi becomes pale and unappetizing almost instantly. The first shot of the salmon hovering over the bowl of soy was pitched to another restaurant, but they balked at the price and had someone else shoot an inferior version of this idea. It is a tricky shot. I built a jig on an arm attached to a lightstand to hold the chopsticks and sushi, and I test lit the shot with a paper towel bunched up as a substitution for the sushi so that when the real sushi appeared, everything was ready. Lighting was very simple. I used a 3′x3′ Norman soft box with a 300 ws monolight positioned to reflect in the soy sauce. The surface is black fabric, slightly tweeked and darkened in Photoshop. The finished shot is a study in minimalism, and I believe that this is a successful finished image.